You Never Know Who’s Listening

Some times you hear the idea that we as Christians, when out and about in the world, can draw the people around us to Christ by our conversation with each other. There’s some Biblical justification for this:

Let your conversation always be kindly, and seasoned, as it were, with salt; that you may know in each case what answer you ought to give. (Colossians 4:6)

And then in my dream I heard another voice — a British philosopher from Oxford named Anthony Flew. After years of advocating atheism, he concluded there must be a God, and wrote about it in "There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind."

I remembered hearing Flew two years ago in Oxford, when he was asked if he had ever met C.S. Lewis, who in 1930 made the journey from atheist to theist to Christian.

Flew shared that as an Oxford student, he and his friends would go for drinks at the "Bird and Baby" pub in Oxford, and would sit as close as they could to the "inklings" — Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Hugo Dyson and other literary types who were also Christian. Flew was taken by their cheerful disputation, their witty repartee, their willingness to take on any idea and consider it from every angle. In short, he was awed by their intelligence, their comprehensive knowledge and fearlessness in the face of argumentation.

These men of good will had sought the truth and found it, and the truth had set them free. They found this truth — not by placing blind faith in an alethiometer, nor in an authoritarian religious bureaucracy — but in a child who was a savior and king, born in a manger in Bethlehem.

And then I heard a voice in my dream say: "Wise men still seek him."

And remember that Tolkien, Lewis, Owen Barfield and the rest were drinking beer in a pub!